2025 is the year for B2B brands to embrace CTV

Connected TV (CTV) is rapidly gaining traction as one of the fastest-growing media channels projected for 2025, thanks to its unique blend of big-screen storytelling and advanced digital targeting. While many B2C and D2C brands have eagerly shifted budgets to capitalize on this opportunity, CTV for B2B remains a stricter challenge — but one more advertisers are ready to tackle.

Setting the right expectations for CTV

A genuine push to include CTV in your media mix requires executive buy-in, so setting proper expectations is crucial. Ensure the following are part of your understanding and how you communicate CTV’s potential.

• CTV is not a pure bottom-of-funnel performance play. You can track lower-funnel KPIs like conversions and form fills using GA4 and/or third-party measurement systems, but there’s a lot of work to do to translate CTV views directly to revenue.
• CTV is best for building brand awareness. Much like linear TV (but more trackable), CTV is about storytelling. Its upper-funnel KPIs include brand lift, audience measurement and reach and website visits (with user demographics and location, which you can get from bringing on a partner). 
• One often under-measured power is its impact on other channels, particularly search and social. There should be a correlation between rising CTV campaigns and improved CTR on those channels — the key is to measure it and find a way to quantify the ultimate value.
• You must budget enough money and time to see if it works. (More on that in a bit.)

Dig deeper: CTV takeover: 2025 predictions

CTV’s holy grail of measurement

This year could mark a turning point for incrementality in marketing, with CTV being no exception. Success means moving beyond unreliable metrics like view-through conversions and focusing on measuring clicks and cross-channel impact directly driven by CTV.

One effective way to assess incrementality is through geo lift (holdout) tests, using a matched-market approach to compare pre- and post-results between similar markets — one with CTV and one without. Tools like Meta’s free GeoLift testing function can be invaluable, though you’ll need someone with R skills or essential programming expertise to make the most of it.

Resources needed for B2B CTV campaigns

It’s crucial to understand the resources you’ll need to run successful (or even conclusively unsuccessful) CTV campaigns.

Testing

You should plan to test for at least 90 days. If you’re ready to pull the trigger after only two weeks, you’re not measuring anything meaningful. While it’s tough to pin down an exact budget for 90 days of CTV testing, you’ll generally need fewer broad metrics like brand awareness than more precise measurements like brand lift and incrementality. Expect to spend at least $25,000 for a geo-lift test to gather meaningful insights. CTV isn’t a cheap or fast channel to test.

Personnel

It’s less about having a dedicated CTV resource and more about having a team willing to dive deep into a new channel. If you’re simply looking to “do CTV” but lack a clear plan for using the technology of partners, your chances of success drop significantly. CTV isn’t about optimizing known channels like Google and Meta — it’s about understanding an entirely different kind of media and helping your team align with that.

Creative

This is another crucial factor. You can repurpose existing videos or create new content, but you’ll need a good amount of video to fuel CTV campaigns. Even if you have top-performing ads on platforms like YouTube, you must broaden your creative themes for audience testing. Whether you bring in an in-house creative director or outsource to freelancers or agencies, you must expand your creative pool.

As for creative tone, B2B audiences are increasingly moving away from overly polished content and embracing authenticity. Focus on two key elements that resonate well with CTV: humor and emotion. A strong story will always outweigh high production value.

The CTV partner landscape

You can start CTV campaigns on your own, particularly on platforms like YouTube TV, where the interface is user-friendly for most teams. However, without a CTV expert guiding the process, you’ll likely make mistakes in audience shaping, placements and optimizations due to insufficient data for informed decision-making.

A better option might be to partner with companies like MNTN, Tatari, Vibe.co, tvScientific or SpotlightIQ (disclosure: that’s my company). Make sure to ask how these potential partners make money. Some of them are “black-boxier” than others, which you want to consider.

Another avenue is to work with CTV-fluent agencies that can offer platform pass-through costs. However, hiring an agency doesn’t replace the need for a platform partner. Some platform partnerships provide account management and martech support if you prefer not to manage both. Be sure to align your needs with the platform’s strengths before making decisions.

Targeting options

Traditionally, this has been the stickiest wicket for B2B CTV campaigns. How do you find the living rooms of the relatively rare businesspeople who need your product or service?

Two recent developments make this easier for B2B brands.

• Google (which has its own CTV offering) recently said advertisers can now use IP addresses for privacy-safe targeting in Google campaigns. This is important for CTV because IP addresses are household-related, and it’s possible to tie device IDs from business IP addresses to home addresses in a hashed, privacy-safe format.
• LinkedIn is beginning to incorporate its treasure trove of professional data into CTV network targeting. As of now, details are scarce from LinkedIn, but it looks like advertisers have the option to run CTV-only brand awareness campaigns through placements on the LinkedIn audience network:

These developments are worth monitoring, especially in order to take advantage of LinkedIn’s future capabilities. 

Dig deeper: LinkedIn introduces CTV ads for B2B campaigns

Additionally, ABM-based CTV targeting is another option to consider. While it can be expensive, tools designed for ABM can ensure that your most significant accounts don’t consume all of your budget. If ABM is central to your marketing strategy, this is an option to explore.

Chalice Custom Algorithms (or incremental ABM when combined with Bombora through The Trade Desk) can target business accounts across multiple DSPs and media channels using programmatic/CTV. With a list of 100 accounts, larger accounts (like Salesforce) usually get most of the budget. However, some tools let you control the budget for each account, giving you more flexibility.

The right time to take the CTV plunge

So says a guy with over 16 years of experience in programmatic. Before you dive into CTV, have an honest conversation with your team about whether you’ve tapped out existing demand capture. You haven’t tapped it out if you’re not struggling to maintain target CPAs on paid search and social. If you have tapped it out, it’s time to get started.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to start paying for CTV campaigns. It means:

• Implementing your incrementality strategy.
• Building up your creative supply.
• Becoming fluent in GA4 to connect the measurement dots. 

All this is important even if you bring on third-party partners. If you can improve your understanding of where your traffic is coming from and analyze the demographics and psychographics of that audience, you’re ready to start spending.

Closing words

Remember: we’re still in the relatively early days of CTV, and more ad-supported streaming options won’t completely mitigate an increase in engagement costs as advertiser adoption rises. That doesn’t mean you have to launch campaigns right now. However, it raises the stakes for getting ready to use CTV as soon as it’s viable for your business.

Dig deeper: How marketers can harness the strengths of traditional and streaming TV